“But, hatani-”
“You’re not going. I don’t need you.”
He walked away.
“Hatani-”
He did not look back. Did not look at the mountainfolk who lined the road near the copter. Some of them were the displaced, he was sure. Some of them had held Sheon, having gotten it since he was renunciate. Now they were abruptly dispossessed. He felt their eyes, heard their whispers, nothing definite.
“Hatani,” he heard. And: “Alien.” Whisper they need not. He felt their eyes trying to penetrate his cloak. They came to wonder what he was as much as they wondered about what he brought. “Hatani.” There was respect in that. “What happened to his face?” a child asked.
“Hush,” an adult said. And there was a sudden, embarrassed hush. It was a child. It had not learned what scars were. It was only honesty.
Duun did not look at them. Did not care. He was hatani, renunciate. His weapons were at his side beneath the cloak. He asked one thing of the world. These hills. This place.
A little peace.
That a hatani dispossessed them- The countryfolk living at Sheon had surely thought their title secure. The land was fallow; the house vacant; ten years renunciate and it was theirs by law.
But it was what he had told Ellud: there was nothing he could not ask and obtain, nothing in all the world
He felt their eyes. Perhaps they expected him to speak. Perhaps they expected him to care, to offer words to reassure them.
But he only walked past them up the road, the dusty road to the heights and the house made of native stone, deep within the hills.
He heard the copter lift. It beat away with small thumps like heartbeats echoing off the mountainside. It had come and gone often here yestereve and three days before, with other craft, seeing to provisions, to special equipment, to all such things as satisfied Ellud and Ellud’s ilk.
Nuisance, all of it.
* * * *
He prepared himself. He knew that Sheon would have changed. He gathered up his resolve in this as in other things. He needed virtue. He sought it in abnegation. He sought it in lack of caring, when he came, in full noon, to the mountain heights, and discovered the things countryfolk had done to Sheon, which he expected: a sprawl of new rubble-stone building, which destroyed the beauty Sheon had once been, a creation of smooth artistry indistinguishable from the living rock of the mountain wall that flanked it. The house sprawled now, artless and utilitarian, the yard about it cleared and dusty. He was not dismayed.
Only when he came inside and discovered what Ellud and his crews had done-that, that afflicted him. Instead of the country untidiness he had expected (different from the time of his childhood, of stones carefully polished, of spacious halls and a sand-garden where the wind made patterns), the government had worked sterility, lacquered the stone walls, sanded the floors in white, not red, installed a new kitchen, new furnishings, all at great expense; and the smell of it was new and pungent with fixatives and paint and new-baked sand.
He stood there, in this clean, sterile, unremembered place, with its abundant stores, its furniture new from the city-
For the infant. Of course, for the infant.
The meds feared for its health. They wanted sanitation.
And destroyed-destroyed-
He stood there a long, long time, in pain. The infant squirmed and began to cry. And he was very careful with it in his anger, as careful as he had ever been. He searched the cabinets for new cloths; found the cradle prepared-
The infant soiled itself. He knew the cry, smelled the stink, which had surrounded him, stronger than the lacquer and dry-dust smell of sand.
He laid it down on the sand; he put off his cloak and laid his weapons down on a riser near the fireplace. He listened to it scream. It had grown. The voice was louder, hoarser, the face screwed up in rage.
He took cloths and wet them and knelt and cleaned its filth in starkest patience; he heated the formula and fed it till it slept. He walked aimless in the halls afterward, smelling the stink it had left on him, and the stink of new plaster, new lacquer, new furniture.